David Remnick Interview: On Ben Bradlee's Fun & Fearless Approach to Journalism

Journalist David Remnick describes Ben Bradlee’s management style, how he exemplified the fun of journalism, and his hatred for a boring story. Remnick discusses the power of newspapers and the importance of putting pressure on power.
David Remnick is a journalist and writer. He has served as the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, and a staff writer since 1992. He has written many pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe, and profiles on Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Remnick began his reporting career as a staff writer at The Washington Post in 1982, and by 1988, started a four-year tenure as a Moscow correspondent. Remnick has written six books, including Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism in 1994; and The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), a biography of Barack Obama.
From the HBO / Kunhardt Film Foundation (KFF) Documentary “The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee,” about one of America's most influential and celebrated newspaper editors, who found himself at the center of many of the 20th Century's most seismic storms, including: World War II, John F. Kennedy, Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon.
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David Remnick, Editor, The New Yorker
Interviewed By: John Maggio
Interview Date: January 10, 2017
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:11 Wanting to work at The Washington Post
02:10 What Ben Bradlee exemplified
04:02 First impressions of Ben Bradlee
05:24 Ben Bradlee's originality
07:27 Journalism as a profession
09:04 Ben Bradlee's management style
11:45 Ben Bradlee's devotion to good storytelling
13:45 Lessons from Ben Bradlee
17:00 Ben Bradlee's appeal
18:05 Ben Bradlee chose his words carefully
19:27 Ben Bradlee's inner life
21:11 Earning Ben Bradlee's approval
22:35 Ben Bradlee's friendship with JFK
25:44 Journalistic integrity
28:25 Ben Bradlee's career timing
30:05 Ben Bradlee turned a good newspaper into a great newspaper
32:35 The Pentagon Papers
33:47 The partnership between Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham
36:42 Fact-checking is essential to good reporting
38:39 Watergate and the Post
39:57 Confidential sources
42:33 You have to be tough to be a journalist
45:05 Nixon's obsession with Ben Bradlee
45:58 Ben Bradlee was self-aware of his persona
47:37 Janet Cooke's fabricated reporting
52:15 No publication gets everything right
55:13 Ben Bradlee was a formidable editor
56:49 The power of the press
57:33 Learning from Ben Bradlee
59:17 How Ben Bradlee would have reported on Trump
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[@arunpradeep4657]

Terrific interview, thank you so much for uploading it! Highly educational and inspiring

[@philipciaffa6643]

Well done! A phenomenal interview! David Remnick is one of the Titans, who can bring his practiced powers of observation, analysis and experience to bear on a Legend. I look forward to viewing the other contributors shortly. The Interview Archive is an invaluable resource to review the component parts of great biographies and documentary projects.

[@pjpredhomme7699]

Wow , I am familiar with Mr Remnick by name only - I so enjoyed his reminiscing of Bradlee - very insightful and entertaining . I have always so enjoyed the NewYorker and am glad to see one of the men behind it .

[@charleswinokoor6023]

The fact is that no one at the Post had the courage and character to challenge Janet Cooke because of her skin color. The same goes for the Pulitzer folks who gave her their award. The premise of her fabricated story - that an 8-year-old boy was shooting heroin, and with the assistance of his parents, if I’m not mistaken - is so absurd that it’s laughable. I think the appropriate term might be white guilt. Whatever you call it, it was colossally stupid. I used to be a not so brilliant reporter for a couple of dailies, and even I would have been capable of sniffing out such a bogus piece of trash.